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I think everyone at some point has one of those characters that you looked at and said “I wanna see if I can make this”.

Well Caress was that character for me. Mostly because it was after a movie with dwarves siege engineers…I can’t really remember which movie this was, because it definitely was not Lord of the Rings…I can’t remember, it had something to do with Dragons in it.

Anyway, I told my dad that I wanted to make a siege engineer, so my dad being the awesome computer programer he is, modified PCGen (a computer program that helps you generate characters) and made it so I could be a siege engineer.

Now this is all and good, but a character that requires a certain weapon is always a little hard to maintain. And because she’s a siege engineer, she has a special Dwarven Siege Cannon. Why is this one so special? It can go ethereal. So you can make the cannonballs go ethereal through a wall and hit the army behind it without damaging the infrastructure.

So as you can see, this is no ordinary cannon. And with a special cannon comes special cannonballs.

Remember how in my last blog I said that my dad makes dungeons you never really forget? This is another one of those dungeons.

Well because this is such a special cannon, I couldn’t just get regular old cannonballs from anywhere. No. My father made an old dwarf out in the middle of nowhere the only guy who had the knowledge to make the cannonballs for my particular cannon. The defining character trait of this old dwarf? He’s gone senile. Dunno why, he just forgets you while you’re talking to him.

At any rate, in order to make these cannonballs, he says he needs 5 fire mephits, 5 rubies, the scales of a young red dragon, and a 10th level wizard. Well, since we had none of these things, we set out looking for 5 rubies, since we thought that would be the easiest things to get off that list. We luckily found a band of gnomes that happened to have a mine nearby (convenient I know), and we traded enough gold for the rubies.

Ok, so one thing off the list, so we went after the mephits, because we didn’t feel like fighting a red dragon just yet, and we didn’t want to trouble a 10th level wizard if we couldn’t even survive a dragon.

Well again, lucky for us, there was an active volcano just a day away. It was tough, but we did manage to capture the 5 mephits. But on the way back, we got ambushed by…

A YOUNG RED DRAGON. D:

Yeah, the luck on that. We were even more lucky that there was no parent around, otherwise we probably wouldn’t have survived, since we were all 5th level. So beaten up, but not broken, we beat the dragon and brought back all the ingredients to the senile dwarf.

Now all that was left was to get the 10th level wizard. We went to the closest town to see if there was one nearby, and there was one, but he wasn’t going to just go to the senile old dwarf for nothing, and we unfortunately ran out of money to give the guy. So he agreed to go if we got him some spell components for him.

What spell components? Well he needed 12 stirges needles, the stinger of a giant scorpion, the venom of a giant spider, and he also wanted us to get rid of the otyugh that was near the town.

Our group looked at each other and just kinda shrugged our shoulders, because regardless, we really needed this wizard right? The dwarf said that he really needed the wizard to finish making the cannonballs, and since my character was all about her cannon, she needed the wizard.

So we went after the giant scorpion and the giant spider first since we actually knew what those were. It was a couple of really hard fights, but luckily our cleric in the party was giving it his all.

Afterwards, we went for the stirges. When asked what they were, my dad just laughed. And then started describing what was happening.

“You start to hear the beating of wings from mosquitoes, but much…much larger.”

So yeah, that’s when we found out that stirges were giant mosquitoes that suck out Constitution points like it’s nobody’s business. At this point the group was kinda annoyed at my father, because he kept throwing really weird stuff at us, and we were getting tired. But there was just one thing left.

The otyugh.

Well this was again, another monster our group had never encountered before, so we didn’t know what to expect.

And then my father was telling us that the smell hit us.

And the ground started to move beneath our feet.

An otyugh, for those of you who don’t know what it is, is a giant trash eating monster. Yeah. A trash monster. This is also where my brother’s hatred for otyughs stems from. Because here was our first character death, his character. Thankfully my dad was nice enough to throw a high enough cleric to raise him after we had defeated it, but it was really stressful.

So finally, we had all the components for the wizard, and he finally agreed to go with us to the senile old dwarf.

We return to the dwarf, who had forgotten to finish the cannonballs while we were gone, and at this point we were all at our wits end with this guy. He eventually gets the cannonballs done, and then looks upon the wizard to do his spell on the cannonballs.

So you’d figure that this wizard was needed because it would be the reason why the cannonballs would go ethereal right? Some kind of dimensional bending spell that would help the cannonballs go ethereal?

Nope.

He needed the 10th level wizard, the guy we nearly all died to get his spell components for, to cast a spell that would scribe the dwarf’s name on the cannonballs.

Because he wanted to make sure that no one else would be able to claim craftsmanship on the cannonballs.

You would not believe the looks on our faces when my dad said that. I think every single one of us all screamed out in pain, and I’m pretty sure my brother was about to have his character rip the dwarf’s throat out.

And you’d think this would be the end of Caress the Dwarven Siege Engineer, since we were all frustrated with getting the cannonballs for this cannon, but no. Caress is by far one of my most favourite characters to play and use. So much so, that my father made more dungeons to utilize her in, as well as a second cannonball adventure…